Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday February 24, 2010 @08:24PM
from the new-stuff dept.

diegocg writes "Version 2.6.33 of the Linux kernel has been released. This version includes the Nouveau driver, Nintendo Wii and Gamecube support, DRDB, TCP 'cookie transactions,' a syscall for batching recvmsg() calls, several new perf subcommands (perf probe, perf bench, perf kmem, perf diff), experimental support for cache compression through swap, Xen PV-on-HVM support, drivers for virtual network and graphic cards from VMWare and other improvements. See the full changelog here."

OK ! - I have a GC sitting here doing nothing since I got my Wii back in 06 or whenever - Putting Linux on the GC could be very nice - how do I go about it? Does it need to be chipped etc? Can I get a 'live cd' and burn it to a 8cm disc?

Though I would wonder at the wisdom of investing time and energy on making it run on a Gamecube, I'd imagine it was actually a pretty simple matter and someone did it as more of a novelty than because they had a legit need for it.

A lot of people seem to think that it takes a ton of effort to make Linux work on a new system, but often it's just a matter of having the kernel detect that it's running on that system and load or not load certain modules. Most hardware platforms use standard parts and technologies from various manufacturers and simply combine them. So if all of the individual chipsets are supported, then the entire platform is as well... though it may need a tweak.

Compcache is a project (still under development, only available in Staging) creates RAM-based block devices (/dev/ramzswapX) which are used as swap disks. Pages swapped to this virtual device are compressed to a smaller size. Part of your RAM is used as usually, and another part (the size is configurable) is used to save compressed pages, increases the amount of RAM you can use in practice.

Everything old is new again, I guess. Back in the day, there was a MacOS extension that did exactly this, called "RamDoubler". It was notorious for causing problems with badly-behaved programs -- the first step in any troubleshooting list was "Turn off RamDoubler".